Im not a fan of spikes for lerk, especially not early game. They were quite tested in NS1 and even there with the weaker lerk they always proved bad for gameplay. Give something an infinitely long ranged attack with almost no energy cost and someone is always going to sit somewhere arbitrary and spike things. I think a decision needs to be made on lerk - if its supposed to fit a more 'harass' role where it should loose a little of its HP and probably have spores, or if its supposed to be more of a skirmish unit where bite should probably be changed.
I still think that marines should be able to build anything on infestation, I did not like that change when it was made in the beta, and it would also fix some of the cyst spam issues.
Also, not a fan because more often than not the Commander has to scan just to see where the fuck it is because it doesn't show up and spends priceless time trying to place a structure near infestation blindly. Very unintuitive and frustrating to be told you can't place it here when on your screen it's just blank even with a Marine nearby.
This mod was a blast to play, but I can't help but think that Vortex is just broken as hell. I was sitting in the center of marine base vortexing myself, shadowstepping in and out to kill them one by one with dual exos and w3 shotguns raining hell upon me.
Other than that, though, I think Fade feels much better--and I agree with a previous poster (forgive me, I forgot who it was) who said that blink feels a TINY bit slow.
yes the phase gate change is very strange and it wont make it into the game in this form, im not a fan of such inconsistencies (as you wrote before, the phase gate breaks now 2 rules, power and infestation) but for the sake of testing im ok with it. i will keep this change in the mod for a while to see how it affects game play, but dont expect that such a confusing change would make it into the official game. if it does it would be in another, less confusing, more intuitive form.
Two options for the power inconsistency:
1) The above on use temporary power surge ability for TRes
2) Add a research directly on the phase gates that has the phase that was upgraded become the power source for the entire network in the case of any gates not having room power. A shader or addition to the model would be needed however to indicate that it was the source to both teams.
edit: I am all for completely removing the marine no build on infestation rule.
Structures no longer require a powernode to work, but without a powernode they only work at 50% capacity.
Phasegates would take twice as long to recharge. Armories would heal twice as slow while possibly not allowing AA weaponry. Infantry portals would take twice as long to port marines in. Observatories beacon takes twice as long to warp marines back to base, may/may not allow tracking/scan. Could say protolabs require too much energy and thus can't function without a powernode.
edit: I am all for completely removing the marine no build on infestation rule.
Then cysts need to be free or have their health increased exponentially; the reason why they were nerfed in the first place because spamming it and locking marines out of structure drops was too "redonk", apparently.
I played about 5 games on this last night. I loved the armory change, and with that change I understand starting with welders researched... but at the same time it felt like it kind of broke early game skulk harassment. I felt more obligated to suicide my skulk to finish off a Res Node, rather than leave it to get repaired. Also early if rines go phasetech you can't peck down a gate. I feel like with the armory change researching welders will happen faster no matter what, so it is going to affect strategies. But giving rines welders off the bat reins in variation in game play it doesn't expand it.
I would suggest make welders researchable but drop the research time to like 5s. I liked that before I could hold off on welders if I wanted to push upgrades or phasetech, that it was a risk but it was worth holding off on if your team is responsive to whack-a-skulk in early game.
the power surge idea is interesting, but i still think phase gates shouldn't be allowed to be placed on infestation. on the other hand, you should probably slightly reduce the size of the infestation field from cysts...maybe by 25%. This would make it a tradeoff for the alien team to prevent sneakiness at the cost of res/time.
the power surge idea is interesting, but i still think phase gates shouldn't be allowed to be placed on infestation. on the other hand, you should probably slightly reduce the size of the infestation field from cysts...maybe by 25%. This would make it a tradeoff for the alien team to prevent sneakiness at the cost of res/time.
It's annoyingly enough to plaster every corner of a room judiciously with infestation - no need to make it even more tedious by lowering the covered area, besides that the infestation visuals would suffer from it because it couldn't reach out to far away geometry anymore. More cyst entities would probably also drag more on the performance and memory consumption.
Anyway, got around to see the new buffed Shades in action today. That ink cloud is really nice and not a single ARC was able to get a shot off before all Shades in the Hive room were destroyed. This really gives aliens a way of defending themselves against ARC pushes (that is if they happened to go Shade Hive at this point) and forces marines to go into the room themselves and clear out the Shade first.
It's not as hard as it sounds once you got Flamethrowers, though. I just went in with one, put the Shade on fire and it instantly stopped it's ink effect, allowing the ARCs to fire and take it down.
We weren't many players on the server (3 vs 3), so we had to rely a lot on RoboFactories and single powerful units like Exos. The MAC's "Follow and Weld" command did wonders to help out in the situation as well, since there were not enough players to follow each other around for welding. So the MACs automatically reinforced each player in combat and helped the player building stuff, without requiring even more micromanagement from the commander.
My only remaining gripe with MACs is that they still get easily confused by Phase Gates. If they decide that they want to weld a player and that player phases away before they finished to do so, the MAC will move all across the map to the new location of the player to continue his work. MACs should just dismiss their weld target if it phases away.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
Wouldn't a "surge" or any power providing ability create the same issue that power packs brought? Using them on ips and other structures that just furthered turtles?
Definitely down for a lerk role revising.
Shotgun spikes, get rid of bite, longer distance yet weaker spores at T1. (Doesn't have to be crop dusting or ranged, there's room for a middle ground)
Down for power nodes just being a light switch, but if that happens you need to remove the red emergency lights else there'd be no point in taking any time at all to flip that switch.
If you make power just for the lights: All nodes should be built at the start so aliens can freely disable the ones they want. Remove automatic emergency lighting, if it is destroyed, they stay off. the comm can spend 3/5 res to turn emergency lighting on in a room. Flashlights need a buff in range.
Wouldn't a "surge" or any power providing ability create the same issue that power packs brought? Using them on ips and other structures that just furthered turtles?
With the advent of vote-to-concede, elements that might further a turtle are no longer a concern (and could even be considered a feature). Teams that want to turtle will, teams that don't want to turtle won't, and players that are in the minority will move to a different server where the other players feel the same way they do.
Vote-to-concede also means that we can introduce elements which can contribute to turnarounds (a very good thing!) without worrying that they might prolong turtling (which they almost certainly will).
Wouldn't a "surge" or any power providing ability create the same issue that power packs brought? Using them on ips and other structures that just furthered turtles?
Well, there would be quite a difference. You can use multiple Power Packs at a time but only keep one structure surged at a time.
Surge only lasts a limited time and may have a longer cooldown. Each use costs res as well, making it possibly more expensive than Power Packs in the long run.
You could also consider to bind it to a specific structure requirement. An upgrade in the Observatory (and require at least one Observatory to still be powered to use the ability) or Command Station. Or make it require a second tech point like Nanoshield does.
I am not sure what to think of the Onos HP change. I didn't get to play it all that much yet, but starting with such low HP and requiring a lot of Biomass to get back to it's original capacity makes it more of a liability early on instead of the match turner that is used to be.
I see the analogy to Exos (HP scales with Armor upgrades), but the difference is that you can get an Exo to it's maximum gamechanging capacity on a single tech point if you hold out long enough. And you don't easily lose that advantage again and even then it' just another 20 res to get it back.
If you lose so much Biomass that you can't use Boneshield anymore, you are probably better off with Fades than wasting your 75 pres on a weak Onos.
So, any ETA on when we will see these changes (hopefully most of them) in the main game?
Because frankly does the main game feel pretty bad once you played this mod for a while. This is the salvation to basically everything people in the forums complain about, except for performance maybe.
And I would love to see some competitive skirmishes with this mod streamed and commented by Wasabi & Co.
So, any ETA on when we will see these changes (hopefully most of them) in the main game?
Because frankly does the main game feel pretty bad once you played this mod for a while. This is the salvation to basically everything people in the forums complain about, except for performance maybe.
And I would love to see some competitive skirmishes with this mod streamed and commented by Wasabi & Co.
yeah this is troubling for me too...
the live build is ruined... it feels like a blizzard game, where it's been nerfed 'till there's no fun stuff left. back to 24/7 turtle marines and 24/7 hit n run aliens that get spanked 24/7 as skulk.
So, any ETA on when we will see these changes (hopefully most of them) in the main game?.
Eh, as much as I like majority of changes, almost all of them require a bit (or a lot) of fine-tuning before they can go anywhere near the official build. Particularly changes to onos and fade.
The only thing I want in the proper game ASAP is "ink countering the ARC", which is pretty much a bug-fix.
Btw, as far as I am aware, at least 1 change already went into main build: The MAC "Follow&Weld" order. :P
I want all that new movement code in the live build as well. Then Skulking finally becomes fun again.
I also want the Phantom to make Shade Hive viable again. (Besides the Ink fix and Drifter bonus)
And Egg Hatch moved from Shift to Hive, so it's actually viable to go any tech path you want without forcing you into one just to prevent your team from being egg-locked two minutes into the game.
Plus Biomass for lategame scaling, so you are less likely to be one-shotted by Weapon 3 Shotguns as Skulk.
The follow and weld is nice, but it's also a huge marine buff on the other hand and has no alien changes to compensate right now. Since the range nerf of Bile Bomb, it is even harder for a Gorge to get close to an Exo that is welded by 4+ MACs.
I want all that new movement code in the live build as well. Then Skulking finally becomes fun again.
I also want the Phantom to make Shade Hive viable again. (Besides the Ink fix and Drifter bonus)
And Egg Hatch moved from Shift to Hive, so it's actually viable to go any tech path you want without forcing you into one just to prevent your team from being egg-locked two minutes into the game.
Plus Biomass for lategame scaling, so you are less likely to be one-shotted by Weapon 3 Shotguns as Skulk.
The follow and weld is nice, but it's also a huge marine buff on the other hand and has no alien changes to compensate right now. Since the range nerf of Bile Bomb, it is even harder for a Gorge to get close to an Exo that is welded by 4+ MACs.
I really think each target should only be able to be welded by one MAC at a time. That way MAC weld rate can be balanced properly among other things.
I want all that new movement code in the live build as well. Then Skulking finally becomes fun again.
I also want the Phantom to make Shade Hive viable again. (Besides the Ink fix and Drifter bonus)
And Egg Hatch moved from Shift to Hive, so it's actually viable to go any tech path you want without forcing you into one just to prevent your team from being egg-locked two minutes into the game.
Plus Biomass for lategame scaling, so you are less likely to be one-shotted by Weapon 3 Shotguns as Skulk.
The follow and weld is nice, but it's also a huge marine buff on the other hand and has no alien changes to compensate right now. Since the range nerf of Bile Bomb, it is even harder for a Gorge to get close to an Exo that is welded by 4+ MACs.
I really think each target should only be able to be welded by one MAC at a time. That way MAC weld rate can be balanced properly among other things.
Yeah I agree, the MAC train on an exo feels way too binary right now - if a Gorge gets there it's useless, otherwise it's invincible.
Wouldn't a "surge" or any power providing ability create the same issue that power packs brought? Using them on ips and other structures that just furthered turtles?
Pretty much, but I think there are ways around that. For example, alien turtles hardly ever work because marines have a magic "shoots-through-walls", high structure damage weapon that only costs TRes unit called the ARC. If aliens had some sort of equivalent structure destroying ability, then you could do all of these things without worrying about it causing unbearable turtles.
And before anyone says "bilebomb", it just doesn't work for this purpose. Its available too early, its too cheap, and is much too easy to use, leading to spam if its too powerful and not being able to break turtles if its too weak.
Instead, I'd prefer something like SC2 'banelings' solely designed for marine turtle breaking. My thoughts are they should:
- Require a 3rd hive
- Cost TRes (cost needs to be balanced around its damage, speed, and health)
- Do massive, AOE damage to structures
- Minimal damage to marines
- Spawn from whips
- Speed, health, and armor set to allow it to survive w3 focus fire of something like 5 marines over a set distance such as from crevice to atrium
- A low-tier but hard to use weakness (such as taking high damage from the axe or welder) so aliens don't try to do hive3 rushing to get it early (e.g. we don't want another 6min onos situation)
bombard whips are amazingly devastating used against buildings, but the problem is getting them into place. it's nearly impossible for them to survive long enough to root and shoot.
bombard whips are amazingly devastating used against buildings, but the problem is getting them into place. it's nearly impossible for them to survive long enough to root and shoot.
Did you try teleporting them in instead of unrooting them?
that's a ridiculous expenditure of resources considering it takes 1 shift per whip to teleport unless you stagger them, which makes the whip rush less good.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited March 2013
Why restrict it to 3 hives?
Just up the cost enough so it'd be a major risk early game, like an arc train, and now you have a tech that can also provide come backs for a flailing alien team (include recycling /digesting ability for khamm finally to facilitate)
Wouldn't a "surge" or any power providing ability create the same issue that power packs brought? Using them on ips and other structures that just furthered turtles?
Pretty much, but I think there are ways around that. For example, alien turtles hardly ever work because marines have a magic "shoots-through-walls", high structure damage weapon that only costs TRes unit called the ARC. If aliens had some sort of equivalent structure destroying ability, then you could do all of these things without worrying about it causing unbearable turtles.
And before anyone says "bilebomb", it just doesn't work for this purpose. Its available too early, its too cheap, and is much too easy to use, leading to spam if its too powerful and not being able to break turtles if its too weak.
Instead, I'd prefer something like SC2 'banelings' solely designed for marine turtle breaking. My thoughts are they should:
- Require a 3rd hive
- Cost TRes (cost needs to be balanced around its damage, speed, and health)
- Do massive, AOE damage to structures
- Minimal damage to marines
- Spawn from whips
- Speed, health, and armor set to allow it to survive w3 focus fire of something like 5 marines over a set distance such as from crevice to atrium
- A low-tier but hard to use weakness (such as taking high damage from the axe or welder) so aliens don't try to do hive3 rushing to get it early (e.g. we don't want another 6min onos situation)
Yeah banelings are really useful. NS2's alien team should also have an upgrade to their basic infantry unit that allows it to self-destruct for heavy damage to surrounding units and structures.
Yeah banelings are really useful. NS2's alien team should also have an upgrade to their basic infantry unit that allows it to self-destruct for heavy damage to surrounding units and structures.
Comments
Also, not a fan because more often than not the Commander has to scan just to see where the fuck it is because it doesn't show up and spends priceless time trying to place a structure near infestation blindly. Very unintuitive and frustrating to be told you can't place it here when on your screen it's just blank even with a Marine nearby.
Other than that, though, I think Fade feels much better--and I agree with a previous poster (forgive me, I forgot who it was) who said that blink feels a TINY bit slow.
Two options for the power inconsistency:
1) The above on use temporary power surge ability for TRes
2) Add a research directly on the phase gates that has the phase that was upgraded become the power source for the entire network in the case of any gates not having room power. A shader or addition to the model would be needed however to indicate that it was the source to both teams.
edit: I am all for completely removing the marine no build on infestation rule.
Structures no longer require a powernode to work, but without a powernode they only work at 50% capacity.
Phasegates would take twice as long to recharge. Armories would heal twice as slow while possibly not allowing AA weaponry. Infantry portals would take twice as long to port marines in. Observatories beacon takes twice as long to warp marines back to base, may/may not allow tracking/scan. Could say protolabs require too much energy and thus can't function without a powernode.
Then cysts need to be free or have their health increased exponentially; the reason why they were nerfed in the first place because spamming it and locking marines out of structure drops was too "redonk", apparently.
I would suggest make welders researchable but drop the research time to like 5s. I liked that before I could hold off on welders if I wanted to push upgrades or phasetech, that it was a risk but it was worth holding off on if your team is responsive to whack-a-skulk in early game.
It's annoyingly enough to plaster every corner of a room judiciously with infestation - no need to make it even more tedious by lowering the covered area, besides that the infestation visuals would suffer from it because it couldn't reach out to far away geometry anymore. More cyst entities would probably also drag more on the performance and memory consumption.
Anyway, got around to see the new buffed Shades in action today. That ink cloud is really nice and not a single ARC was able to get a shot off before all Shades in the Hive room were destroyed. This really gives aliens a way of defending themselves against ARC pushes (that is if they happened to go Shade Hive at this point) and forces marines to go into the room themselves and clear out the Shade first.
It's not as hard as it sounds once you got Flamethrowers, though. I just went in with one, put the Shade on fire and it instantly stopped it's ink effect, allowing the ARCs to fire and take it down.
We weren't many players on the server (3 vs 3), so we had to rely a lot on RoboFactories and single powerful units like Exos. The MAC's "Follow and Weld" command did wonders to help out in the situation as well, since there were not enough players to follow each other around for welding. So the MACs automatically reinforced each player in combat and helped the player building stuff, without requiring even more micromanagement from the commander.
My only remaining gripe with MACs is that they still get easily confused by Phase Gates. If they decide that they want to weld a player and that player phases away before they finished to do so, the MAC will move all across the map to the new location of the player to continue his work. MACs should just dismiss their weld target if it phases away.
Definitely down for a lerk role revising.
Shotgun spikes, get rid of bite, longer distance yet weaker spores at T1. (Doesn't have to be crop dusting or ranged, there's room for a middle ground)
Down for power nodes just being a light switch, but if that happens you need to remove the red emergency lights else there'd be no point in taking any time at all to flip that switch.
With the advent of vote-to-concede, elements that might further a turtle are no longer a concern (and could even be considered a feature). Teams that want to turtle will, teams that don't want to turtle won't, and players that are in the minority will move to a different server where the other players feel the same way they do.
Vote-to-concede also means that we can introduce elements which can contribute to turnarounds (a very good thing!) without worrying that they might prolong turtling (which they almost certainly will).
Well, there would be quite a difference. You can use multiple Power Packs at a time but only keep one structure surged at a time.
Surge only lasts a limited time and may have a longer cooldown. Each use costs res as well, making it possibly more expensive than Power Packs in the long run.
You could also consider to bind it to a specific structure requirement. An upgrade in the Observatory (and require at least one Observatory to still be powered to use the ability) or Command Station. Or make it require a second tech point like Nanoshield does.
I am not sure what to think of the Onos HP change. I didn't get to play it all that much yet, but starting with such low HP and requiring a lot of Biomass to get back to it's original capacity makes it more of a liability early on instead of the match turner that is used to be.
I see the analogy to Exos (HP scales with Armor upgrades), but the difference is that you can get an Exo to it's maximum gamechanging capacity on a single tech point if you hold out long enough. And you don't easily lose that advantage again and even then it' just another 20 res to get it back.
If you lose so much Biomass that you can't use Boneshield anymore, you are probably better off with Fades than wasting your 75 pres on a weak Onos.
Because frankly does the main game feel pretty bad once you played this mod for a while. This is the salvation to basically everything people in the forums complain about, except for performance maybe.
And I would love to see some competitive skirmishes with this mod streamed and commented by Wasabi & Co.
yeah this is troubling for me too...
the live build is ruined... it feels like a blizzard game, where it's been nerfed 'till there's no fun stuff left. back to 24/7 turtle marines and 24/7 hit n run aliens that get spanked 24/7 as skulk.
Eh, as much as I like majority of changes, almost all of them require a bit (or a lot) of fine-tuning before they can go anywhere near the official build. Particularly changes to onos and fade.
The only thing I want in the proper game ASAP is "ink countering the ARC", which is pretty much a bug-fix.
Btw, as far as I am aware, at least 1 change already went into main build: The MAC "Follow&Weld" order. :P
I also want the Phantom to make Shade Hive viable again. (Besides the Ink fix and Drifter bonus)
And Egg Hatch moved from Shift to Hive, so it's actually viable to go any tech path you want without forcing you into one just to prevent your team from being egg-locked two minutes into the game.
Plus Biomass for lategame scaling, so you are less likely to be one-shotted by Weapon 3 Shotguns as Skulk.
The follow and weld is nice, but it's also a huge marine buff on the other hand and has no alien changes to compensate right now. Since the range nerf of Bile Bomb, it is even harder for a Gorge to get close to an Exo that is welded by 4+ MACs.
I really think each target should only be able to be welded by one MAC at a time. That way MAC weld rate can be balanced properly among other things.
Yeah I agree, the MAC train on an exo feels way too binary right now - if a Gorge gets there it's useless, otherwise it's invincible.
And before anyone says "bilebomb", it just doesn't work for this purpose. Its available too early, its too cheap, and is much too easy to use, leading to spam if its too powerful and not being able to break turtles if its too weak.
Instead, I'd prefer something like SC2 'banelings' solely designed for marine turtle breaking. My thoughts are they should:
- Require a 3rd hive
- Cost TRes (cost needs to be balanced around its damage, speed, and health)
- Do massive, AOE damage to structures
- Minimal damage to marines
- Spawn from whips
- Speed, health, and armor set to allow it to survive w3 focus fire of something like 5 marines over a set distance such as from crevice to atrium
- A low-tier but hard to use weakness (such as taking high damage from the axe or welder) so aliens don't try to do hive3 rushing to get it early (e.g. we don't want another 6min onos situation)
Did you try teleporting them in instead of unrooting them?
Just up the cost enough so it'd be a major risk early game, like an arc train, and now you have a tech that can also provide come backs for a flailing alien team (include recycling /digesting ability for khamm finally to facilitate)
@crushak: I know, right? That thing was sexy
Yeah banelings are really useful. NS2's alien team should also have an upgrade to their basic infantry unit that allows it to self-destruct for heavy damage to surrounding units and structures.
Oh wait...